Friday, August 2, 2013

Interview with Craig Morrison

Craig "Silirrion" Morrison, movie buff, twitter enthusiast and former Game Director for the Age of Conan took his time to answer few questions about his day-to-day routines in MMO development.

What does Game
Director do on a daily basis? Let's say that it's Monday morning, you have your
cup of coffee steaming and now what?

I think it’s important to note up
front that my personal role changed a lot over the years, and there was a
reason I also had the various production titles down the years, first as
Producer, then Executive Producer, and ultimately as the Creative Director for
the Montreal studio, so my days could be very different from what they were
like when I first started out as a Game Director on Anarchy Online.

There were there though certain
elements of my days that were pretty consistent and tied to how I approached
the positions I had.

I was pretty much an early bird, and
liked to get into the office relatively early most of the time. When I first
got in I tried to spend an hour or so just browsing industry news and
information. I had a list of websites that I worked through to keep up to date,
from the MMO specific sites like Massively and MMORPG.com through industry
sites like Gamasutra and Gamesindustry.biz to the more general gaming sites
like IGN, Kotaku, Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, and a lastly a few more pop
culture centric sites to keep up to date with the other creative industries.
IO9 is a particular favourite. It might not sound important, but I always feel
that it’s important to know your industry as well as you can, even the stuff
that doesn’t always naturally interest you specifically.

Then I’d start with my mail; I could
easily be accused of being a little OCD when it comes to a clean and organised
inbox, and so anything urgent would be dealt with first thing. Check there were
no new fires burning! That would lead me to the stats, as I would get three
specific overnight reports that I checked every morning.

There would be one on server
activity, how many players logged in, hours played, class breakdown, level
breakdown, activity levels by server etc, this would quickly show me if
anything worth investigating was going on that we weren’t expecting. Then there
would also be a report from the billing and customer service side of things,
which showed payment info and stuff like that, it could also flag stuff up that
needed looking into.

Lastly there were the shift reports
from the QA and customer service departments. The QA report would give the
status of their testing on whatever builds they were currently working on,
while the CS folk would provide an overview of the issues that affected
customers on the live servers.

Then I would try and spend an hour
or so going through the various forums for the games, and some external ones.
It was almost important for me to keep up to date with what the voices in the
community were saying.

We used a task management system
called JIRA, and our awesome project managers had a suite of reports that gave
me an overview of progress and where we were at with things. I would go through
the top level reports each morning and make sure I didn’t see anything that
alarmed me.

I would chat with the producers for
a bit, make sure there were no major problems they needed help with. We would
go over anything they wanted to discuss, or just wanted some feedback on, or if
I needed anything looked into based on what had cropped up in the reports etc.

That would generally take you
through the morning and then the afternoons could be anything! With such a
changing role there were any numbers of meetings that might occur, anything
from the hiring process, through meetings with Marketing or management, to
content reviews, design meetings, or meetings with partners or external folk.

Generally I talked with people, but
if that sounds banal, I’m kind of underselling it. A lack of communication, or
miscommunication, is usually the root cause of many of the challenges you face
in game development with a large or medium sized team, so the talking becomes
important. Whether it’s just chatting to the team to see progress or making
sure people are talking to the people they need to be talking to, often nothing
beats just having that extra conversation. It can save you a lot of time down
the line!

How much
creativity is there is in Game Directors daily routine? Do you design anything?
Have a lot of meetings with the members of the team to see what have they come
up with? Do you give the team a general idea for the new content or are you
reviewing their plans?

I think that depends on the person,
and the team. When I was first a Game Director on Anarchy Online we were a
small team, so it was very creative and very collaborative and we all had to
pitch in. We were only four or five people on the game design side, so it was
very organic and we were all involved because we were all talking together
pretty much all the time. I guess I was ‘in charge’, but to be honest it never
felt like that, we were an awesome little team, and I really enjoyed that
environment. Everyone on that team was experienced and knew what they were
doing, so we rarely had much conflict outside of the normal creative
discussions.

That’s simply not possible on a
larger team, so working on Age of Conan was a very different challenge. The
team was close to two hundred people when I took over, and even years later,
prior to the time they downsized all the teams earlier this year, there were
still thirty people directly on the development team.

It’s the hardest part of
transitioning to more of an executive role. Is coping with the realization that
you can’t do everything yourself anymore, and worse, you absolutely shouldn’t,
because it’s generally not conducive to keeping a happy team.

It also depends on the person I
guess. Some Game Directors are more hands on than others. While some like to
micro manage more, others prefer to take more of a behind the scenes role.

Personally I like to get a bit
metaphorical and compare it to the role of the pilot that joins a ship to see
it through a river channel or a dock. The team are the ship and the producers
the captain, the Director or Executive producer is not there to tell them how
to run the ship, but we are there to point out where the rocks are and where
they need to get to. I have found the best balance for me results in that kind
of a guiding role.

So we would be the ones laying out
the intentions, drawing the box as it were, and then it would be about trusting
the team and empowering the team to fill the box with the content. If your
systems, tools, and general directions are understood by the team then they can
usually work some magic when allowed to really own, and take responsibility,
for their own content. I’ll always prefer that to designers feeling like they
are just peons rigidly implementing someone else’s ideas. You will almost
always get better content out of happy, inspired designers.

That’s not to say they are left to
their own devices completely, we would review the content as it went along (and
the producers and lead designers do a lot of that), and I made sure to play
through everything before it went live, both on internal builds, and more
importantly on the test servers, as there I could also do it with real players.

Generally however, as long as the
set-up and briefings were done right, we didn’t run into too many problems with
people going ‘off the reservation’ as it were. The team knew what was required
of them, and went at it. The challenges were usually more likely to be implementation
issues, or trying to push the tools a little too far! When you have creative
people they are always looking to push the boundaries of what is possible with
their tools, especially as they get more experienced, so sometimes you have to
balance ambition against the time available for a particular piece of content.

If you
could make one more add-on for AOC is there a particular REH story that you would want to explore?

The original team had already
tackled one of my favourites in ‘The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” and in some ways
it was hard because of when in Conan’s timeline the game was set, after Hour of
the Dragon. That limited some of the direct implementations we could do. So we
had to get creative, as we did with ‘Shadows in the Moonlight” for example, I
loved what the team did with that one, and see the players revisiting one of
Conan’s adventures years later.

Personally, I would have loved to
have found a way to explore the great barbarian’s pirate years and his time
with Bêlit, in “Queen of the BlackCoast”. That was one of
the first Conan stories I read, and I always liked it. The main issue was that
it risked feeling a little like we were retreading Tortage, and the timing just
never seemed to work out to do something there. I would have loved to do
something with it, in particular as Dark Horse did such a great job with the
comic adaptation last year.

What tools
did you use to keep tabs on Age of Conan project? I imagine there was a lot of
things to track of.

As I mentioned earlier we used a
reworked version of a tool called JIRA for our task management. There were also
the reports I mentioned earlier, I tried to keep constant tabs on what was
going on with the game. There is a lot going on, and a lot of teams
interacting, so keeping track of things becomes very important.

What is the
toughest part of being GD and what is the most satisfying about it?

The toughest part is always having
to play the bad guy. Even under the best circumstances you invariably have to
say ‘No’ far, far more often than you say ‘Yes’. With so many great creative
folk involved there is never a shortage of ideas or suggestions and you simply
don’t have anywhere near the time and resources to do them all. So the toughest
part is trying to prioritise between what might be two, there, for or even more
really good ideas for what you can do with say one available slot for new work.
You might think that all of them would make great additions, but you can only
do one. Those are usually the really tough choices and the hardest part of the
job.

The other end of the spectrum is an
easy answer

The most satisfying thing for me is
always happy players J.

Playing on the live servers and
seeing players enjoying what the team made is a great feeling. Really it’s why
we do what we do. The creation process delivers some satisfaction in and of
itself sure, but it pales into insignificance compared to the feeling you get
when you see the positive impact it has on the players’ experience. At a
fundamental level that is why most creative people want to create, to have it
enjoyed by others.

Nothing beats that for me.

What do you
think was the biggest achievement of the development team and what was not
entirely satisfying? Stats system and
Bori are not permitted as answers :]

I have a soft spot for the SavageCoast
adventure pack. When it comes to the balance between the size of team and what
they achieved that was probably one of the best deliveries we made. The team
did a good job of making the pack, while still providing live updates, and the
finished results were some really cool content. The instances clicked for me,
and I felt they were the closest we got to really nailing a ‘Conan’ experience.

In terms of something I’d have liked
to have done better, I think I would have preferred if we had stuck to the
original concept for the alternate advancement system. Our original idea did
not have any ‘passive’ abilities and everything had to be slotted in one of the
six available slots. That way players would always have had to choose and we
would have avoided the issue you see today with veterans having a real
advantage, in particular in PVP.

It is one of those situations where
hindsight is 20/20. At the time there was a real concern that such a system
would not motivate players long term, and they would get the six to twelve
skills they wanted, and then not care about the AA system. Even the player
feedback backed that up, and lack of longer term goals was one of the driving
criticisms for adding it in the first place. It was a trade off, we could
foresee the potential issues with passives, but at the time we decided that it
was worth those risks. If I could go back and change that back to what we
originally said I would.

In many ways it’s indicative of the
challenge with bringing more open systems to a progression based game. Fear
creeps in, and you start inching towards what you see as a ‘safer’ option. That
is one of those times I wish we had been a little more adventurous.

From
professionals perspective how big of a shift have you noticed in the MMO market
since AOC went live? Is there any other industry that you would compare the
changes to?

Night and day to be honest! The
market has changed massively since I started working on MMOs. The audience is
larger, and also more demanding, not just in terms of content consumption, but
also for quality and experience. The online space itself is changing. More and
more genres are moving towards having almost compulsory online experiences,
some for the better, and some maybe not so.

Essentially we are fast becoming a
more and more connected society, and games are simply reflecting that. It’s all
new and still, to a degree, unknown. We are also a relatively young industry,
and haven’t matured yet. Think about it, movies have been learning for over a
century, TV for over eighty, so we are very much the proverbial new kid on the
block. That’s an exciting thing to be a part of, but it also means the future
is very hard to predict. I point out to people that when I started at Funcom, you
tube didn’t exist … think about that for a second … it’s now so influential, so
pervasive, yet it didn’t even exist less than a decade ago. An iPad was a prop
from Star Trek.

Personally I think that’s an amazing
thing, and yields a lot of potential for creating future virtual worlds and
games. We have learnt a lot from the generations of MMOs so far, and I still
believe that someone is going to take them a step further, and then a lot of
doors will open. There will be challenges for sure, and ultimately we might
have to move beyond the way we have thought about them so far, but that is
probably a bit away yet. Each generation teaches you something new, and will
challenge our perceptions about what works and what doesn’t. The key is taking
the best parts from each generation and continuing to evolve the genre.

I’m not sure there is anything else
that can compare to the potential, as games have always had the unique element
of interaction, and MMO style games have the added element of human
interaction. That brings with it a lot of good, and a lot of bad, but has the
potential for interactions that go far beyond simply scripted thrill rides. I’m
looking forward to continuing to explore that potential!

5 comments:

The overall AoC community blames Craig for the current game situation.My opinion is simply that if it wasn't for Craig the game would be offline by now.Some ideas work and result in awesome content and some simply fell down flat in the floor, that's how it works in game development. And in AoC case some of the fails I blame the community, because players will always try to find a way to cheat, avoid and exploit everything to their advantage.

I don't like the fact that so much content is underused, like Erlik, and the Raid encounter in HoC + some of the dungeons from 2011+

I think they should also have just built on the current crafting system, because now we haven't had a crafting update for 3+ years. And that's killed off parts of the economy. Other games with 10m+ subs have a similar shitty crafting system.

I don't like that blue items don't drop from new content. there should be new blue items at a normal droprate (not like khitai blue items).

Those are my main complaints about the Silirrion era.

These are in my opinion quite basic things that should never have gone wrong.

I think Craig did a decent job. There are some things that were implemented during his tenure that I vehemently disagreed with. Horse racing being among them, it was a waste of resources of time in my opinion.

As an ex-blogger, ex-dedicated HoX player, I'd like to thank AGAIN Craig for what he has done.I had the chance to have several chats with him on twitter, through his blog, on IRQ and I can say that one thing cannot be denied: His willingness to improve AoC.I do believe, as Kravex does, that after a TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, DREADFUL release of the game, Craig took the good out of the messs and brought it under the lights.He may have done some mistakes? Who doesn't? Some things may have been done or done better? Some things that were needed and never looked at? Yeahm all true.But... I remember day 1 of AoC, and I see what it is now.

About Me:

"The blond myth of Aquilonia"
Playing Age of Conan since may 2008. I have been PvPing with assassin class throught out all the changes and revamps.Currently playing on Fury PVP server. Whisper /w Slith to contact me.